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Relational Objects: Connecting People and Things Through Pasifika Styles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2008

Anita Herle
Anita Herle
Affiliation:
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Email: ach13@cam.ac.uk
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Extract

Debates around cultural properties tend to focus on law and ethics, on appropriation and ownership, with media representations often producing stereotypes that reinforce and polarize the terms of the debate. The common, typically polemical, notion is that rapacious museums are merely a final resting point for captive static objects, with repatriation viewed as simply restorative compensation. A robust challenge to this view was developed in the Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums signed in 2002 by the directors of 19 leading museums in Europe and North America. The concept of the universal museum asserts that objects are cared for and held in trust for the world, overriding shifting political and ethnic boundaries and enabling the visitor to see “different parts of the world as indissolubly linked.” Although many would be in sympathy with the rhetorical position asserted, critics have argued that the declaration is a thinly veiled attempt to bolster immunity to repatriation claims. On both sides of the debate, the hegemonic position of many museums remains unsettling.

Type
Special Section: Museums and the Pacific
Information
International Journal of Cultural Property , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , May 2008 , pp. 159 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © International Cultural Property Society 2008

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